The lastest warning on why we must all either have no sex or safe sex tells us that if you sleep with ten people then, if you count back their partners and their partners former partners, etc etc it is the same as if you had slept with the entire population of Belfast. I contemplate this matter as I examine the twitter connections of someone who, I belatedly notice, has followed me.
The idea of sleeping with the whole of Belfast is profoundly worrying. It is not that you would not have some fun as you worked your way through 286,000 people. But I would have thought that images of Gerry Adams stripping of and striding across a bedroom towards you would be enough to put anyone off sex for life. Perhaps that is the hidden message from the public health campaigners.
As you are about to engage in a casual unprotected sexual encounter suddenly you will, going forward, find yourself thinking of St Gerry standing there with blood on his hands and wearing just his Y-fronts. "Gerry is that an armalite rifle or are you just very pleased to see me?" As this appalling image flashes across your mind, at that point no amount of viagra is going to save the situation, your casual sexual encounter will just not happen.
This idea of sexual connections is on my mind having examined the 280 followers of someone who I have belatedly noticed has followed me on twitter who I knew well many years ago. How many twitter followers are you away from someone you have had, er... relations with? In this case the twitter person is not in that category. I tried my best but was rejected in a very sweet way. My pride was restored some years later as I discovered that this charming person was just not interested in men per se. Being rather naive this was something I had just not considered possible at the time. FFS she was very pretty, clever and interesting and almost seemed to like me, surely God cannot be so cruel (to me) as to make her a lesbian? Well he did. C'est la vie.
But among the 280 there is an ex girlfriend. There you go. It is like being told that you are never more than six foot away from a rat in London. Not that she was or is a rat at all. I have a horrible feeling that I was. Equally I am sure you are never more than x twitter followers from someone you have known. But what is x?
Meanwhile I am sure that that the ex girlfriend and I would never have, got to, er...know each other had either of us considered that image of St Gerry in his Y fronts at a post wedding party many many years ago.